Valentine
by Dakki
Summary: Quick! To the docks, boy! The lobsters are rebelling and we need every good man…they’re ganging up on the fishermen…
1. Once Upon a Time

Valentine  
  
*~*~*  
  
Every night, there was a new story to be told.  
  
Every night. No matter how late, no matter how tired—he would wait for her to come home, softly close the door behind her, and in the coal-dark, her braids unwound, soot drifting past her half-closed lids—into her arms he came. It was always Valentine. When he cried it was her, when he was sick—a baby, he buried his face in her neck; when there was pain. She would hold him close and calm him with the rhythm of her heart, give him his safety, bringing him by hand with her love. Always Valentine.  
  
Seven years older on this earth was not such an enormous gap in knowledge or in strength, at least not once they were both grown-up, brave souls leaving childhood behind. Later on, maybe, she would be secure in her role of older sister. But back then, in the aching darkness of his childhood, she was everything. She knew the words to every song, the ending to every story. And every night, a new story to be told.  
  
The myths and fables, passed down barely recognizable, and endless fairy tales, raveled and unraveled, citified—the beast an evil Bowery slumlord, Beauty a kind-hearted working girl from queens—pirates and dragons and princesses with hair of gold. Family legends from the old country that neither of them had ever known, invented fields and rolling hills in a tiny town in Italy that neither could pronounce. And the stories about their father, who hadn't been Italian at all, but a luckless Irish gambler who had died when his son was only three years old. And those were Anthony's favorite stories of all.  
  
"What happened after that, Valentine?"  
  
"Well, Papa leans over to me then, and he says, real loud so the whole table can hear, 'I'm gonna whisper in your ear what hand I got, Val, an' you gotta promise not to have any expression at all. Jus' keep a straight face like a told ya.' And I nodded. So he leaned over, and he said to me, real quiet, 'I got a royal flush, now keep that poker face on, kid.'"  
  
Anthony sat up a little. "So what'd you do then?"  
  
"Well, I couldn't help it...I let out this huge grin. The more you try to keep a straight face the harder it is to do it. You know that...every time you get a good hand, you start smilin' like the cat that ate the canary..."  
  
"Do not."  
  
"Do so. Anyway, the whole table realizes they're gonna lose. Everybody folds. After we collected the money an' were about to leave, I looked at papa's cards, to see what hand he had..."  
  
"And?"  
  
Valentine smiled, her eyes half-closed, holding back a yawn. "Two pair. Fives and threes."  
  
Anthony laughed at that. "How old were you?"  
  
"Oh...six, I guess."  
  
"So I wouldn't have been born yet."  
  
"Nope. Not for another year."  
  
"Can you tell me about when I was born? How on th' way to the hospital--"  
  
"Not tonight, Anthony," she said softly. "I'm tired."  
  
It was past midnight. They were sitting up in her bed, and she slid down, resting her head wearily on the pillow. Anthony burrowed down next to her, head resting next to hers, her dark curls falling across his face, still smelling smoky from the factory air.  
  
Opening her eyes a little, she reached up and kissed him on the forehead. "Bed now."  
  
"Tell me another story?"  
  
Valentine sat up, smiling, the covers heaped around her shoulders like a cloak. She reached out her arms like wings and in them she enveloped her brother. He closed his eyes, happy, and knowing in his heart that it would always be Valentine, Valentine ssh, ssh, tell me where it hurts, holding him close against her...and resting in her arms he had that safety, eyes closed, drifting, drifting.  
  
And slowly, softly, Valentine began the story.  
  
"Once upon a time, there was a prince..."  
  
*~*~* 


	2. The Boy with the Whiskey Eyes

Valentine met Pinky Falconetti on New Year's Eve. Factory girls wanted Brooklyn boys with the same strong and unstinting passion that rich girls wanted husbands. Valentine's best friend, Katie Finnegan, was one of those most determined to snag a Water Street newsie. ("The toughest, most rough- and-tumble boy of them all," Katie had said dreamily, in the same tone that a girl might use to talk about cornflower eyes and arms strong enough to hold you forever.) Every year there was a party, down at a cheap tavern called the Fiddler's Green, and Katie was determined to go. After three days of wheedling, Valentine reluctantly agreed to come along. So Katie brushed Valentine's dark hair out, and Valentine brushed Katie's red, and on New Year's Eve they went down to Brooklyn, hoping luck was on their side.  
  
Katie wasn't as pretty as Valentine, but she was twice as bold, and within a half an hour of her arrival she was up at the bar, sharing a gin fizz with a green-eyed boy named Shrug Weber. Which left Valentine back up against the wall. She wasn't an awful dancer and rhythm wasn't lost on her, but the music being played tonight suggested some kind of complicated reel or highland fling, which led her to the eventual conclusion that she was just about the only Italian girl in the place. (A true friend's work is never done.)  
  
But you can't stay still long in the Fiddler's Green without somebody taking notice. And someone noticed Valentine. She saw him as he was walking over to her, a slight boy with dark hair and darker eyes, a scar scored across one cheek. (Katie Finnegan would have swooned.) He had coarse hands, callused and rough, but beneath that—Valentine saw even then—he had beautiful fingers, long and fast. He came over to where Valentine was standing, said hello, and asked for her name.  
  
"Do you want my real name, or my dance hall name?"  
  
"Your real name." He looked at her in the eyes, taking her in, and she looked back. His eyes were the color of whiskey.  
  
"Valentine."  
  
Don't go anywhere with someone you don't know; don't go out late with strange boys. But Pinky wasn't strange. Valentine knew him. She knew his eyes and his deep and broken voice that made her turn, she knew his hands. He led her down underneath the bridge, wondering all the while why he didn't bring her back to the room in the lodging house where he brought the other girls. She sat with him in the quiet and didn't fill the space with talk; they shared nips from a flask and she taught him how to count the stars. And while they were sitting in the dark as he measured her breaths and tried to pick a moment to lean in and kiss her, she kissed him: just lightly, on the mouth, soft as a fluttering of wings.  
  
When they got back, of course, Katie Finnegan was gone. So he walked her home, all the way up through lower Manhattan. When they got to her door it was nearly dawn. And he kissed her again, and in her ear, his face buried deep in her neck, he said again her name, just softly: Valentine. Valentine. Valentine. And then he was gone.  
  
At six o' clock in the morning on New Year's Day, it began, very softly, to snow. Valentine knew which window was Anthony's. She tossed up pebbles against the glass, and when finally the window opened wide, and a sleepy face stuck out, she half-whispered, half-shouted to him: "come down."  
  
When he emerged from the building Valentine was flushed with cold, but not shivering. Snow was falling like the feathers of heavenly birds, falling into her dark curls and touching his face as pinpricks. He didn't know what was going on with his sister but he knew that she was smiling, and that was enough somehow. She held him close to her, looking up at the sky, and told him just one thing, barely above a whisper: "remember this." And he did. 


	3. Factory Girls

When she went to work the next day, Katie Finnegan had dark circles under her eyes and a love-bite on her neck. Valentine asked her how the toughest, most rough-and-tumble boy had worked out in the end, and Katie only laughed.  
  
"I'll find him next time," she said at last. "Don't you worry your pretty little head about it, Higgins. I'll find him."  
  
"I don't doubt it," Valentine said, smiling as well, because she had always liked Katie for being so optimistic and unfettered in a way that she could never have been.  
  
By rights, Katie should have had even more to worry about than Valentine did. Because while Valentine only had a plaintive little brother to take care of, Katie had a mother and a father and older brothers and a younger sister and a grandfather, and all of them crammed into a tiny east-side apartment with four small rooms and one even smaller window. But while Valentine accepted responsibility, Katie willfully threw it off. Her parents and her brothers loved her and doted on her, and as long as she brought home a paycheck every week they had no bones with her, and as long as she could still go out dancing on Saturdays, no rough-and-tumble boy in the city of New York was safe.  
  
Beyond finding true love, Katie had one other thing to worry about, and that was her nephew. He was her oldest sister's son, the one person Katie had always looked up to. Clare had been roses and cream, fragile, her touch light as frost; she had gotten married when she was only sixteen to a man who had split town less than a year later when Clare died of diphtheria, leaving their young son to be taken in by the Finnegans. And since Katie was the oldest daughter in the family, and at the tender age of eight professed to love babies, licorice, and Sean McFlaherty who lived down the street more than anything else in the known universe, Clare's orphaned son was taken in under her wing.  
  
He wasn't even that much trouble now, not really, and especially in comparison to Valentine's brother. Because Francis rarely got into fights (like Anthony did) and even more rarely attempted to cheat the other kids out of their pocket money by holding fixed slug races (like Anthony did), and was the sort of stoic little boy who hardly ever cried, even in infancy. He was mellow and charming in his own sweet way, and if he never loved or needed Katie as fiercely as Anthony did Valentine, it was never something that was sorely missed.  
  
Katie also discovered that once the boys could be left alone, she could cut down on her workload even more by bringing Francis over to Valentine's apartment and letting the children play together outside while they sat in Val's room, drinking anise tea and talking up a storm. For a time, the boys would play amiably at marbles or stickball, until, inevitably, the peace would be shattered, the argument always surfacing at the same point.  
  
"Hey, Francis? Ain't that a girl's name?" (That was Anthony, of course.)  
  
"Shut up."  
  
"I think it is. You want me to call ya Franny from now on?"  
  
"SHUT UP."  
  
"Franny! Franny! Franny! Franny! Franny! FRAAANNNNYYYY BABYYYY..."  
  
"SHUT. UP."  
  
"Oh, yeah? Why dontcha make me, Franny?"  
  
So Franny made him. He reached out and thumped Anthony as hard as he could (which, it must be admitted, wasn't awfully hard), and Anthony thumped him back, and pretty soon they were fighting like tomcats, kicking up dust in the street and rolling around on the ground and making a fairly good effort at killing each other. This went on for a while until finally one of the girls (usually Katie) would stick her head out the window and shout down at them to apologize to each other and play nicely or not play at all.  
  
"Oh, yeah?" Anthony would say, jumping up and striking a defiant pose. "Why dontcha make me, Katie?"  
  
And Katie would come down and make him.  
  
After both boys had been threatened, cajoled, and told that in future it would do them good to guard their noses, Katie would go back upstairs and back into Valentine's room.  
  
"So what's his name, Val?" she asked quietly, knowing that she had to use just the right tack to get the information that she wanted. But Valentine surprised her this time. She wasn't coy or withholding. She simply lay back on the bed, smoothed her hair away from her face, and looked out the window, smiling faintly.  
  
"Pinky Falconetti." 


	4. Queen of Hearts

I.

Right off the bat, Anthony loved Pinky Falconetti. He was like the brother he had never really had, except that in this case his brother always told stories that began with "So we were in this bar in the Bowery and all of a sudden Sully pulls a knife", had a number of fascinating scars, some resembling the outlines of major constellations, and wasn't afraid of anything. He also knew how to steal, lie without giving himself away, fistfight, hold his breath for exactly three minutes, and was the best poker player in Brooklyn. He still let Anthony win, though. With Valentine, he didn't have to: she had learned from her father, and was just as good a player as he was, if not even better.

But there was one thing about Pinky that Anthony loved especially, more than anything else about him: he made Valentine happy. And that was the best of all.

For the first time since their father died, she didn't seem to be carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders anymore. All her stories had happy endings; she opened the window as she did the laundry late at night after returning home from the factory, and sang into the street. People down below tilted their heads up and shouted, cheerily, "shut the hell up, you Wop whore!" at which point she called down, just as brightly, "VAFFANCULO!" and then began to sing even louder. She laughed more. She would knock off work to go to Sheepshead Bay with Pinky and Anthony, or down to Coney Island, to ride on the rollercoaster and have cotton candy for breakfast. (The best part for Anthony, though, was always the ingenious ways they came up with to get him out of school: once, Pinky burst into the classroom in the middle of a geography test, his eyes wild, to all but drag Anthony out the door with barely enough time to get out of his seat, yelling the whole way: "Quick! To the docks, boy! The lobsters are rebelling and we need every good man…they're ganging up on the fisherman—when you see Fat Angelo…OH, THE HUMANITY! THE STREETS ARE FLOWING WITH RIVERS OF BLOOD… — oh, hello Miss Šťovček, yes, we'll have him back tomorrow, don't worry — no, I'm fine, I lost that finger years ago…ANTHONY! What are you doing? THE LIVES OF INNOCENT MEN REST IN YOUR HANDS! NO, WE CAN'T TAKE YOUR GRAMMAR BOOK. _HURRY!_")

Valentine had to marry Pinky, Anthony decided. Everything would be better then. They could move out of the apartment on Prince Street and into the Brooklyn lodging house, and Anthony could be a newsie too (at this point, being a newsie seemed to be the most noble profession in the world, except for trapeze artist, obviously). He would change his name to Falconetti; no one in the entire city would remember who he used to be. And he would never have to grammar homework again.

II.

They always went back to Valentine's room. Late at night, after they were both done with work, or in the small hours of the morning, when he would climb up the fire escape and through her window. He never really needed much sleep, he said. And then he would slowly undo her braids, running his quick fingers through her long, dark hair that smelled of soot and sweat and something sweet beyond all that, and he would bury his face in the coolness of her neck, just to breathe her in. And she would kiss him: just softly, on his closed eyes, his cheeks, his rough hands. Every night he seemed to come to her more bruised and battered then before, his breathing a little harder, his eyes a little less hopeful. And she waited for him: so she could hold him, and touch him, and calm for just a few hours the rage and heat of desperation that he felt.

She was so gentle sometimes, it made him feel almost like crying. But he hadn't cried in years, not since he was a child, couldn't even remember the last time—and he didn't think he could ever have done it now, not even if he tried.

Once in a while, he held her just too tightly, and pale skin bruised easy. He got wild sometimes, desperate, clawing at her heart, tearing at her sheets. Afterwards, when she held his head to her chest to feel his heartbeat, he wondered who would notice it.

"No one," Valentine whispered. "Maybe Katie. My mother wouldn't."

"How can you tell?"

"She doesn't notice you when you come in, does she?" She ran a hand through his short dark hair, her fingers pricked and ragged from feeding bobbins all day long. "She doesn't notice anything."

"Why?"

"Too drunk." She smiled. "Did I tell you what happened the other morning? Anthony's on his way to school, she leans out the window, asks him, why's he walking like that, he feet all curled up? Says he's worn through the soles of his boots, there's nothing between his feet in the pavement."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing. Just went back to bed."

Pinky looked up, furrowing his brow. "Well, what about your old boots? He could wear those, couldn't he?"

"No…_I'm _wearing my old boots."

He frowned. "I'll steal some new shoes. For both of you." He smiled, and leaned upwards, kissing at her throat and using his teeth to trace the lines of her collar. She noticed, as he was illuminated by the lamplight, just how drawn his chest was beginning to seem, how clearly she could make out the outlines of his ribs.

"Do you know what you said, when I first met you?" she asked him, smiling.

"No. What?"

"You said _I hate children_. _I was never a child_."

"Hmm."

"You seem to have changed your mind, Falconetti."

He looked her in the eyes, smiling his wolfish grin. "Don't go getting knocked up, Val. I've just…changed my mind about a few things."

And she smiled and rolled over on top of him, dark curls falling across her soft cheek, tangled in the threadbare white sheets. "Never, Falconetti," she whispered, and she trailed her hands down his chest, so lightly it made him shiver. Her lips were hot with blood when she kissed him, and he moaned beneath her touch.

Later, when they were lying in each other's arms, the sun as it brightened the sky signaling that it was time for him to go, he kissed her one last time on the forehead, and wound a lock of her hair around his finger. "All I want to do is be with you," he whispered. "And all you make me want to do is be a better person. I only have so much time."

She didn't know what he meant by that, and thought it over as she lay in bed, after he had gone. Something about the way he had said it, so urgently, had puzzled her: and how, later that day as she was stripping the bed, she found the faintest stain on the pillow where his head had been, three little drops like a pattern of stars, the color of blood long dried.


End file.
